The chuckling fingers (4 page)

“Good lord, I didn’t mean to let you carry that. I forgot it.”

“We carry fine,” Toby said for me tactfully, and burst off toward the kitchen where Jacqueline and Myra were. Octavia was still in her corner.

“Boat b’oke,” I heard Toby announcing intensely. “Boat b’oke!”

Jacqueline came into the living room to meet her, brushing her walnut-brown hair back, not glancing at me.

“What’s Toby talking about?” she asked, and then, without waiting for an answer, began talking about clean hands for dinner. Toby kept on sputtering about the boat as Jacqueline took her upstairs, but Jacqueline, I think, didn’t even hear. I followed Bill to the kitchen.

“Goodness, we thought you must be eating at the resort, you stayed so long.” Myra looked up from the potatoes she briskly mashed. “Was Jean around? He could have had dinner here.”

“Jean and Bradley Auden and a girl named Cecile Granat,” I answered when Bill didn’t.

“You don’t know it but you’re gossiping,” Myra told me. Then to Bill, “I’m glad to see that chicken. Just put it on the table. And hurry washing—we can eat right away. Ann, if you want to help you could wash at the kitchen sink… .”

So I turned to the homely details of getting dinner on the table. One of the things I’ll remember about those days is the way the necessary routine of life—meals, sleep, getting up in the morning—went on as a background to the other activities that held us. I even remembered Lottie’s message and got in one question I’d wanted to ask.

“Is Fred up here this summer?”

Apparently Fred wasn’t connected in Myra’s mind with the trouble. She answered at once, “Oh yes, didn’t you know? He won’t be here for dinner though. He’s out on a hike with some other young people.”

The Fiddler’s Fingers kitchen was big and dark and 1890-ish, but what could be done for it in the way of working space and gray and watermelon paint had been done; the effect was homey and pleasant. I was at the linoleumed counter, dishing up the mashed potatoes, when the bulk of an extremely short, thick man showed formless against the light glare of the side door.

Myra said, “Oh, Phillips. Ann, I don’t think you’ve met this last member of my family—my brother.”

Phillips came in, preceded by an aroma of leather and tobacco I recognized as a well-advertised man’s perfume. He wasn’t much like Myra and certainly he wasn’t like Octavia. Maybe he had nice bones underneath, but it was hard to imagine him having bones; his pink, glistening skin looked full to bursting. White hair stood out all over his head like an unpruned bush. He didn’t seem to look at me, but I got the impression that his browless round gray eyes had managed to take me in pretty shrewdly before he thrust a pink soft hand at me.

“Just a brother. No one bothers to say I’m a Heaton,” was what he said negligently, in a thin, almost feminine voice. “Bill’s the only Heaton that counts nowadays.”

I murmured something. What he was really looking at was the stuffing-plumped chicken Myra was lifting to a platter. He moved toward that as if the steaming, delicious fragrance pulled him with strings.

Myra commanded sharply, “Do let’s for once have a whole bird on the table,” as she held the kettle over the gravy boat, pouring out the thickened gravy.

He answered comfortably, “Don’t be mean, Myra,” and, with suddenly deft, quick movements of his hands, picked up the butcher knife to sever a wing.

At Myra’s silence and compressed lips he chuckled, lounging to the doorway to lean against the casing, where he stripped the meat from the wing with dainty, snapping bites. When he was done he threw the bones toward the sink. They missed, but he turned and went out the door, not even shrugging, just letting them lie there.

“Ugh,” was what I thought. So Myra didn’t just have that sister on her hands—she had this brother too. He looked like a beachcomber to me.

* * *

When and with what results Bill would bring up the story of the smashed motorboat and the wire that tripped Toby—that question was what filled my mind as we gathered around the table set on the side porch. As the meal went on, however, it seemed that again I was to get little light on what I wanted to know; instead I was to hear about Heatons.

The atmosphere of personal withdrawal and strain wasn’t diminishing; I could feel it in Bill at the head of the table, in Jacqueline at the foot, in Myra across from me, even in Octavia, who, to my surprise, slipped, wraith-like, out to sit at Myra’s right—in Duluth she’d always eaten in her room. Only Toby and Phillips were exempt, and Phillips had an atmosphere of his own. Apparently he set out to be deliberately annoying.

We’d no more than sat down before he began what for a startled moment I thought was going to be grace.

“For what we are about to receive we thank Thee, Lord— Heaton.” He sat back in his chair looking at Bill, the crow’s feet of a smile indenting the padded corners of his eyes.

Pink deepened in Myra’s cheeks. I guessed Bill must be paying at least part of the household expenses, but why shouldn’t he, staying here for weeks?

“Don’t let me spoil your appetite, Phillips.” Bill remained cool, taking up his fork.

“Honestly, Phillips!” Myra expressed controlled exasperation. Then to Bill, “You know how delighted—”

The grin appeared briefly. “Don’t say it, Myra.” It was affectionate, and he glanced at me.

“Has Jacqueline told you the big news—why we’re here?”

Jacqueline hadn’t told me anything.

“No,” she said.

“Myra and Phillips and Octavia have sold me Faraway.” Some of the lines in Bill’s face smoothed at the thought. He leaned forward to talk with the enthusiasm he’d had about life at his wedding.

“Fiddler’s Fingers is Myra’s, you know. It was her husband’s. Faraway is the Heaton estate—old Rufus Heaton’s own. It’s right east of the Fingers. Not a pine on it’s been touched. Did you know there are just three private estates left on the North Shore, where the original white pines still stand, and those three estates are the Fingers and Faraway and Auden? Wait till you see the lodge I’m going to build. That’s why we’re staying here this summer—so I can watch the building.”

“It’s going to be wonderful.” Myra, too, lifted to animation. “Heatons living at Faraway again, and Toby and Jacqueline staying where I can see them every day.”

With no idea in the world I was blundering against anything —after all, it was the idea that would come into anyone’s head— I said, “I suppose the original house has fallen to rack and ruin if no one’s been living there.”

Short dead silence in which everyone except Toby—even Phillips this time—stared down at the table.

Curtly then from Bill, “That house burned.”

Jacqueline began explaining gently, “It was a tragedy, Ann …”

The first stillness on Phillips’ face broke into a chuckle as he resumed eating.

“Hear the music of a family skeleton rattling, Ann? You see, old Rufus Heaton, that most honored of our ancestors, married when he was forty or so and had a son. That son’s name was Daniel, and that wife died. Rufus married again—this time what, by all we know of her, was really a very clever young—All right, Myra, I won’t use the word. That wife had a son, too —Charles. Somehow or other Daniel got disinherited when he was sixteen, and, considering that Rufus had ripped half the trees of Minnesota from their outraged stumps, that was supposed to have put Daniel out about two million bucks. So everything went along swimmingly until the year of Our Lord 1920— Old Rufus and his wife had died before that—when the house at Faraway burned down. Charles got burned to death in that fire, and Daniel died soon after.”

“He was burned, too, saving the pines,” Bill added savagely, and I felt my mouth opening. What about saving Charles? was what I wanted to ask, but even I couldn’t ask that. Under every word Phillips had said there had been crosscurrents of hidden meanings and old stresses.

“In case you’re a little at sea,” Phillips went blandly on, “Daniel was Bill’s father, and Charles was the father of the other lovely Heatons you see before you. Retributive justice, isn’t it? Bill, of the disinherited line, comes up in the world, while we, of the favored line, go down.”

“We aren’t exactly starving.” Myra obviously didn’t like the conversation.

“But ah, I remember the old days.” Phillips paid no attention, smiling dreamily across the table. “Grandfather’s heyday—what a heyday it was! I can remember the old boy standing on the banks of a flooding St Croix. I was just a kid then. Grandfather was all of seventy. The river was full of logs and log rollers, with Grandfather yelling what he thought of them. After a while he ran out himself. He was the best of the lot even then. He kept his log on the roll and himself on his feet. He had on patent-leather shoes, I remember, and his thick gold watch chain dangled, and the cigar didn’t even fall out of his triumphant, grinning face—a grin just like Bill’s.”

He went on to tell of a long glittering table at which he’d sat as a moppet of ten or eleven. Teddy Roosevelt had sat at his grandfather’s right, the famous Roosevelt smile outglittering the crystal. He told of the winter his grandfather had taken him East—Myra too. They’d stayed at the Waldorf and seen the plays; the best hadn’t been good enough for Grandfather.

As he talked I began to get the feeling of the Heatons, what they’d been and what they were—proud, imperious, bold, lavish, a little remote and scornful of lesser people. I could feel that, whatever divisions there had been, there was also a family likeness and solidarity. Against that union Jacqueline was an alien, as I was, in spite of her double relationship to it, because Pat Sallishaw, too, had been a Heaton just one more generation removed than Bill. Toby was listening, her eyes big. For the first time I realized with a pang that Toby wasn’t all Gay; she also was a Heaton; this past of which Phillips spoke was part of her heritage.

“Well, hi-ho,
sic transit
.” Phillips ended his recital with a shrug. “We were punkins in those days.”

The moment he quit talking Toby straightened, anxious to add her bit to the family conversation.

“Boat b’oke.” She nodded her head violently. “Bill, didn’t it b’oke?”

Impossible not to notice her, with no one else talking.

Myra asked, “What does she mean, Bill? Boat broke. She’s been saying it ever since she got back from the resort.”

“Oh,” Bill said. He laid his fork across his plate, sitting back, letting an expectancy fall before he told them.

“Sometime during the night some—person—smashed Ed Corvo’s boat. With an ax. Ed’s getting in the sheriff.”

CHAPTER THREE

AN INSTANT OF suspension, in which forks halted halfway toward plates, in which shoulders held taut, in which the sounds of the wild wilderness swept through the porch, and I seemed to hear even at that distance the chuckle of the Fingers. Only the eyes moved from face to face, Jacqueline and Myra looking as if they wanted to cry out, denying that such a thing could have happened. Bill’s eyes lit by fierce demand, Octavia’s for a moment clear and open but quickly sensing my glance and retiring behind that contortion of embarrassment, Phillips’ covert and small in his stuffed pink face, as if a drawstring had puckered the lids.

That was almost the only reaction. Eating resumed. Only Phillips asked a few politely interested questions: when had the damage been discovered, how bad was it, had Ed any suspicions as to who’d done it. Bill answered shortly and uninformatively, his downcast eyes dreary.

What had he gotten from that abrupt announcement? I couldn’t tell.

* * *

My necessity to get to the root of things wasn’t lessening. As soon as we rose from the table I turned on Jacqueline. “So far I haven’t had a word with you.” No reason why I shouldn’t make it open. “I propose we go for a cousinly walk.”

Quickly she began stacking ice-cream plates, her eyes avoiding mine. “Wouldn’t you rather just? We could get up a table of bridge. Myra loves to play.”

Quick awareness and approval of my purpose from Myra.

“Nonsense! Why don’t you go blueberrying? Thrifty of me, but the berries are lovely this year—they’re fun to pick. I’ll get Toby to bed and help Lottie.”

The men had stepped outside for smokes. I hadn’t even seen Octavia vanish, but she was gone. Resistance stayed on Jacqueline’s lovely mouth. She started to object again but then she looked at me and saw her stand was useless.

“All right. But we’ll have to change to rougher slacks. We’ll take Toby up.”

Toby expects to be captured for a nap. She and I were both breathless by the time I had her high over my head where she could wriggle and squeal but didn’t dare jump. Jacqueline had gone upstairs.

“Toby goes in the northeast room,” Myra told me over the hubbub.

One door on the hall upstairs was closed, the center door on the east, which I thought must be Octavia’s. Jacqueline was also in the northeast room, changing.

I began, “Toby could sleep in my room while I’m here.”

Jacqueline held back her answer for a second. “Oh, we’re not crowded. Fred and Phillips have rooms over the boathouse.”

In the pause before she answered I had time to see that in addition to Toby’s crib near the window the only other bed in the room was a single bed and that on the dresser were Jacqueline’s tortoise-shell dresser set, her manicure things. None of Bill’s things.

* * *

Jacqueline wasn’t going to proffer anything. She moved alooffy and dispiritedly on the way back up the drive toward the highway. Before I asked any questions I set myself to quicken her pace, talking of Toby and Aunt Harriet, anything to loosen her mind from its fastness. By the time we’d crossed the highway and traversed another belt of pines she was at least stepping and breathing faster. Beyond that second stretch of pines there opened a bumpy section of hillocks and swampy pools where the ground, the rocks, the hillocks were covered with low plants as dark and shining a green as holly, clustered with frosty blueberries until they looked like violets. For an instant I felt dissociated. This must be the reality—this beauty and the sun warmth that lay along my skin like a flush, with the exhilarating chill air under the warmth. But right beside me was Jacqueline’s cold quiet to remind me of the other.